Buttercup (genus Ranunculus), also called crowfoot, any of about 250 species of herbaceous flowering plants in the family Ranunculaceae. Buttercups are distributed throughout the world and are especially common in woods and fields of the north temperate zone.

Buttercups (genus Ranunculus).

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Most buttercups have tuberous or fibrous roots and solitary or loosely clustered flowers with five green sepals, five glossy yellow (sometimes white) petals, and numerous male and female structures (stamens and pistils).

Sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus).

Frances V. Davis

The turban, or Persian buttercup (Ranunculus asiaticus), is the florist’s ranunculus; usually the double-flowered form R. asiaticus, cultivar Superbissimus, is grown for the winter trade. Among the many wild species are the tall meadow buttercup (R. acris), native to Eurasia but widely introduced elsewhere; the swamp buttercup (R. septentrionalis) of eastern North American wetlands; and the Eurasian creeping buttercup, or butter daisy (R. repens), widely naturalized in America. Both the pond crowfoot (R. peltatus) and common water crowfoot (R. aquatilis) have broad-leaved floating leaves and finely dissected submerged leaves.

Yellow water buttercup (Ranunculus flabellaris)

Kitty Kohout—Root Resources/EB Inc.

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the buttercup family (order Ranunculales), comprising about 2,252 species in 62 genera of flowering plants, mostly herbs, which are widely distributed in all temperate and subtropical regions. In the tropics they occur mostly at high elevations.

...When the petals of the corolla are of the same size and shape and when they are equidistant from each other, the flower has radial symmetry, and the flower is called regular or actinomorphic (e.g., buttercup, Ranunculus; Ranunculaceae). In regular flowers, any line drawn through the centre will divide the flower into two identical halves. When at least one petal of the corolla is...

When the different members of each whorl are alike, the flower is regular and is referred to as actinomorphic, or radially symmetrical, as in the petunia, buttercup, and wild rose. Differences in size or shape of the parts of a whorl make the flower irregular (as in the canna and Asiatic dayflower). When a flower can be divided by a single plane into two equal parts, it is zygomorphic, or...